While working at his Communist Youth League office in May 1969, Sergei Kourdakov was visited by Ivan Azarov, a well-known KGB official. He came to tell him about a "special-action squad" he was forming as an official but secret branch of the city's police. After telling Kourdakov that he had gone through his record all the way to his days in Children's Home Number One and complimented him on his ability to captivate people so well during speeches, he stated his desire to place him as the leader of this new group. Although Sergei tried thinking of reasons to reject the offer while Azarov was telling him all this, he immediately reconciled after hearing the pay he was to receive for each operation...twenty-five rubles. At the time he received seven rubles per month as a naval cadet and if he were to become an officer in the Navy, he would still only receive seventy rubles per month.
One of the main duties of being the leader of this organization was to pick the best men from the academy to work in the organization, usually consisting of about twenty men. Kourdakov later wrote that he assumed that with this "special-action squad," he would be dealing with "drunks, murderers, wife beaters, and other lawbreakers the regular police couldn't take time to deal with." And true to his assumptions, that was what he and his team were assigned to deal with. For the most part, they would be sent to bars and clubs to break up fights.
But after a few operations, the group was told that their abilities would be put to a different use, breaking up or raiding secret Christian home worship services. Under the leadership and influence of Ivan Azarov, Kourdakov and the others in his group became convinced that Christians, "Believers" as they were always referred to, were a serious threat to the Communist party and the Soviet Union. Aside from "roughing up" the members of a service, they were also instructed to arrest the leaders of the group and confiscate any bibles and other religious texts. Sometimes they were told to arrest every participant.
Christian persecutions
The first of these operations, as Kourdakov puts it, ended in disaster. When they arrived at the house where then meeting was, none of the members put up a fight, leaving the group in a very awkward and uncomfortable position. For a while from then on, the group received mostly orders to break up more fights. The squad's first major operation was in small village called Elizovo, near the Avacha River and 35 miles to the north of Petropavlovsk, where a baptism service was being held. Clubs in hand, the group hid in nearby bushes preparing for the Believers to arrive. Soon after they had finished the baptisms, the squad sprung into action. In just five minutes, all of the Believers were knocked down to the ground, all of the bleeding in one way or another. One girl's ear had been split open, and the group's pastor laid dead and floating down the river. As further torture and humiliation, the bleeding young girls of the group were stripped naked and driven in that state to the police station, an act greatly disapproved of by Ivan Azarov due to the fact that everything conducted by the squad needed to be done in secret, and that doing something like that could turn the people against the police.
Many of these raids continued in similar fashions. The leaders of the worship groups were usually arrested and sentenced to many years in Siberian labor camps. Along with the duties of being the leader of the police group, Sergie Kourdakov continued studying at the naval academy, hoping to become a radio engineer in the Navy. He still retained his position as the leader of the academy's Communist Youth League and continued to compete in the school's sports, primarily consisting of wrestling, judo, karate, and track.
Any religious writings found during raids were confiscated. Any printed materials, including bibles, were sent to Moscow where they were studied and analyzed. In his book, Kourdakov quoted Azarov on the use of printed material: "Another organization and department branch has been established in Moscow to study the teachings of these Believers, so we can better oppose and defeat them. There our finest scholars are studying their literature, including their Bible, in order that they can learn how to better fight their religious beliefs. It's sort of a complete and full-scale Bible college." Another one of Sergei's duties as leader of the squad was getting rid of other religious texts, specifically the handwritten or very old materials, which were usually used to heat furnaces.
The group was able to determine where Believer meetings were happening before they began through use of spies in the networks of underground churches throughout the region. These people were paid much more than Kourdakov and his men because if they attended a meeting that was going to be raided, they would end up being beaten as much as the Believers. Another part of Kourdakov's job was to prepare reports and record the names of all of the Believers caught, to be entered into a nation-wide database in Moscow. Sergei later wrote that "In addition, a three-by-five-inch card with the Believer's picture, birth date, and other data was sent to the police station. These cards were kept in a special file. Any time the party chose, the Believers could be rounded up and removed from society quickly."
Meeting Natasha
During one of these raids, Kourdakov took particular notice of one of the Believers, Natasha Zhdanova, whom he at the time saw as particularly attractive. At that particular raid, one of the squad's members Victor Matveyev had smashed her against a wall. Sergei had usually assumed that Believers, especially younger ones, would distance themselves greatly from Christian meetings after experiencing the wrath of his group. But only three days later, he found her at another meeting. This time he decided to take matters into his own hands, delivering a very severe beating. After reading her records and discovering that she had been part of the Communist Youth League, Kourdakov saw it as his duty to set her straight and had her come to the police station to have a talk with her, in hopes of frightening her into breaking off from the underground Christian church. But only one week later, during yet another meeting, they found her again. Alex Gulyaev, another member of the squad, moved to attack her with his club, when Victor jumped between them. When Alex demanded that he get out of the way, Victor said, "Alex, I'm telling you, don't touch her! Nobody touches her! [...] She has something we don't have! Nobody touches her! Nobody!" The raid ended abruptly as all of the meeting's members were sent out. Natasha Zhdanova's name was later used in the alternate title for Sergei Kourdakov's autobiography
The Persecutor, which was also published as
Forgive Me, Natasha.
On April 22, 1970, Sergei Kourdakov attended a live televised major Communist party convention to celebrate the 100th birthday of Vladimir Lenin and honor the future leaders of the party. He was invited to receive an award which honored him as the Number-One Communist Youth of Kamchatka Province, for which he prepared and gave a fifteen minute speech, which was broadcasted nationwide. There he met Comrade Orlov, the party leader for Kamchatka. During the banquet following the convention, Orlov, drunk with vodka, invited him into the private dining room reserved for party leaders. What waited inside shocked Kourdakov. Inside he saw all sorts of expensive delicacies he did not expect to see and vodka "flowing like water," but more importantly, he witnessed the state of the party leaders...drunk, passed out, or drinking themselves to unconsciousness. Many of them had their faces in their food and one was lying on the food serving tray. Comrade Orlov had excused himself and when he came back, continued drinking. Soon, he began criticizing Stalin, Brezhnev, and eventually communism itself, at one point shouting that "Communism is the worst curse that has ever come to man!" This was a turning point in Sergei's life. He later wrote that he had been a genuine and firm believer in communism. But after witnessing the hypocrisy of those top party leaders, his goal in live had changed: "From now on, there was only one goal: Get to the top! If the game was played by cynicism and ruthlessness, I'd play it that way."
By mid-1970, Sergei Kourdakov was beginning to notice new patterns in the ways the Believers worshiped. Although the usually split into groups of around fifteen, they began meeting in groups of ten or less, which required Sergei's group to perform more raids in order to have as much of an effect on the Believers. He also began to notice an increase in Believers, which made it seem to him that the bigger fight the put up, the larger they grew. Soon the group was operating on a tight schedule instead of just being called in whenever they were needed. Another trend he noticed was that may of the new Believers were young people, often as young as him. This made little sense to him, as he had a hard time understanding how Christianity could appeal to young people so much. With all of these operations occurring, news of the group began to spread throughout the public.
Exposure to the Gospel of Luke
By July 1970, the group had accumulated much handwritten religious texts. On one particular day, the police captain Dimitri Nikiforov asked Kourdakov and Matveyev to go to the basement of the police station and burn some of the text for heat. While Victor left to get some vodka for themselves, Sergei sat down there trying to figure out what "young people see in this trash." As he thought of Natasha, a sense of curiosity overcame him and he picked up a text, which happened to be an incomplete copy of the Gospel of Luke and began reading until Victor came back. Kourdakov later wrote in his autobiography about his experience when reading the book for the first time:
"At the first opportunity I had, lying in my bunk at the naval academy, I opened up those pieces of paper and began to read them again. Jesus was talking and teaching someone how to pray. I became more curious and read on. This certainly was no anti-state material. It was how to be a better person and how to forgive those who do you wrong. Suddenly the words leaped out of those pages and into my heart. I read on, engrossed in the kind words of Jesus. This was exactly the opposite of what I had expected. My lack of understanding, which had been like blinders on my eyes, left me right then, and the words bit deeply into my being. [...] Through the days and weeks ahead, those words of Jesus stayed with me. I couldn't shake them, hard as I tried. I wished I hadn't read them. Everything had been so organized in my life, but those disturbing words had changed something. I had feelings I never had felt before. I couldn't explain or understand them."—Sergei KourdakovThe Persecutor
In late July 1970, Kourdakov was sent to Novosibirsk for military duty. Although he was to stay in Novosibirsk in case of a military emergency, he took a plane to Moscow to visit the tomb of Lenin for the second time, hoping that being near his body would give him a sense of direction, something the corpse fell short on. Leaving the tomb that day, Sergei made his decision. He would leave Russia. He soon formulated a plan that would involve him swimming across the Tisza river to Hungary using an aqua-lung he acquired at a black market. He even went as far as obtaining Hungarian currency and making his way to the border, but after seeing the immense amount of security at the border, he quickly realized that it would be impossible. With his military leave ending, Kourdakov flew back to Petropavlovsk. Soon enough he was back to conducting raids against the Believers' meetings. He later wrote that because he was dissatisfied and ill at ease at the time, the last raids he led were the most vicious.
During one particularly large raid, Sergei suddenly became emotionally grieved and left in the middle of the raid. On that day he decided to quit working for the KGB and from then on began giving excuses when told to gather up men to perform raids. Eventually he was relieved of his duties and continued as leader of the academy's Youth Organization. To persuade him to stay, Dimitri Nikiforov offered to place him in the Tomsk Academy, a well known school for KGB agents. Kourdakov rejected it.